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Comment by clumsysmurf | Hacker News Reader

One of the things that keeps me going is a connection to nature & outdoors. When it gets severed or disrupted, perhaps by a move to a crowded area without access to trails and open spaces, I get very depressed.

Looking at footage from the video, I would be very depressed living in such crowded conditions. Maybe even suicidal.

I wonder if part of our ecological crisis is that people are so disconnected from nature, they forget or never understood how much they depend on it - not just from nutrition & ecological services standpoint, but psychologically and spiritually as well.

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The world is too much with us indeed.

Have you heard of Calhoun's mouse experiments? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Calhoun#Mouse_experime...

Maybe we are exhibiting the attitudes Calhoun observed in the "beautiful ones". Scary.

Fascinating read. Thanks.

Truly. The concept is depressing and liberating at the same time.

Here's a video on Dr Calhoun's "Mouse Utopia" experiment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z760XNy4VM

Our Disneyland isn't going to be a ride in the park.

I think I agree with you. The world seems overcrowded to me. I've never been much of an out of doors person but sometimes I'd just like to get away from it all. That seems difficult these days. Anywhere you go in the US it seems like the land is either privately owned or government owned with tons of regulations that nobody really wants to deal with. Those regulations are probably at least somewhat needed because without them the sheer number of people visiting government lands would probably do great damage. Anything above about 1 billion people on this planet seems probably suboptimal to me.

Some people think it should be 500 million:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Guidestones#Inscriptio...

Not overcrowded, just spread out too thin. The reason the US looks like it looks is that everybody wants an acre of land around their house, so they chop down forests and build suburbs instead. If people gave up on that notion and where willing to live in cities then there would be an abundance of unspoiled nature.

Every place is pretty much owned in America. Land is valuable. And there is admittedly little or no unspoiled land left.

But don't blame houses. People in America still live on a tiny fraction of the land. Its all about farming and grazing and mining.

The Feds own most of the land.

See chart "Federal Land as a Percentage of Total State Land Area"

http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2014/04/the-ugly-facts-...

Sure, and they rent it out for grazing, mining. Still nothing like 'unspoiled'.

Personally I don't necessarily care much about "unspoiled". I just wish there was a place I could legally go without paying tribute to the world machine and be free from outside interference with my mere existence.

EDIT: In fact living in a world where such a simple act is not possible isn't a bad definition of hell in my opinion.

Well, there's all that federal land, right?

Personally I just walk out my door - I have 80 acres of rolling hills, trees, occasional waterways, deer, pheasant and miscellaneous critters. Bought by selling my quarter-acre in San Jose and relocating.

In Canada you can just camp out on crown land. We have so much extra space its mind boggling.

One thing to do to cure yourself of the whole the world is too crowded feeling is to take a flight from Europe to Either Vancouver or Japan and just marvel at how many hours you'll spend flying over Russia or Canada and not seeing any signs of civilization.

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